Knowledge uncertainties in environmental conflicts: how the mussel fishery controversy in the Dutch Wadden Sea became depoliticised

ABSTRACT

Policy-makers and scientists often expect that controversies in public policy can be solved by gathering more knowledge, even though this linear model of expertise is widely criticised in social studies of science. To shed more light on this expectation, the role of scientific uncertainties in controversies on mussel fishery in the Dutch Wadden Sea (1990–2016) is investigated. The analysis shows that mussel fishery regulation decisions were primarily based on government authority, not on scientific knowledge. Expectations of policy-makers and scientists on conflict resolution by more research were not met, because the knowledge debate was politicised over ambiguous knowledge claims. The controversy was depoliticised by a political covenant between the conflicting parties. The case study confirms that science-based knowledge fails to guide policy-making as expected in the linear model, and demonstrates how science plays important strategic, procedural and instrumental roles in structuring interactions between stakeholders in nature protection conflicts.

KEYWORDS:

• Depoliticisation
• knowledge expectations
• knowledge uncertainties
• science-policy interactions
• mussel fishery
• Wadden Sea

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to our respondents and appreciate the valuable feedback of Marjanneke Vijge and Franke van der Molen. We appreciate the valuable feedback of the three anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We conducted data collection in January 2011–July 2016 as part of a PhD project on the role of science-policy interactions in the Wadden Sea. A full list of interviews is available on request. The authors translated quotes from the interviews into English.

2. The full name was Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Fishery, and later Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality. In 2010–2017, it was part of the Ministry of Economic Affairs.

3. In this period, the fishery debate included cockle and mussel fisheries. This contribution focuses on the mussel fishery debate; for an overview of the cockle fishery debate, see Floor et al. (2013).

4. Regulation on bird protection changed in 2004. Instead of yearly food availability assessments, the government restricted fisheries to unstable mussel seed banks in autumn and introduced an administrative requirement to record mussel transports to keep 85% of the fished juvenile mussels in the Wadden Sea for the winter.

5. These mussel banks have the potential to become multi-year-old wild mussel banks; see Floor et al. (2016) and Alterra (2005) for details.

6. The following nature organisations signed the covenant (‘Convenant Transitie Mosselsector en Natuurherstel Waddenzee’): the Society for the Protection of Birds, the Wadden Sea Society, the WAD Foundation and the Society for the Preservation of Nature Monuments (‘Natuurmonumenten’).

Additional information

Funding

The Sea and Coastal Research Programme of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) supported this work under [Grant no. 839.10.162]